1500TT minimums ?

Firebird2XC said:
If you're not prepared to pack up your kit bag and walk away from a loaded aircraft when you know somebody is crossing a line they should not, you don't belong in this profession. If Shaw or Renslow had done that, maybe we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
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What would tell us it wouldn't have happened again a month later if one of them had walked away from a loaded aircraft?
 
mikecweb said:
So your saying if one pilot packed up his flight kit and went home the flight would still go and crash?
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No, as I said above, a pilot walking away won't prevent *every* crash, as the cause of every crash isn't attributable to human error. Mechanical failure, for example. What I'm saying is that there are times when pilots allow themselves to be put in compromising positions because they lack the wherewithal to walk away when they know they should.

drunkenbeagle said:
What would tell us it wouldn't have happened again a month later if one of them had walked away from a loaded aircraft?
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A pilot walking away from an aircraft one day doesn't not guarantee that another pilot won't be pressured later, but it sure as hell puts a penalty on those instigating such situations by not rewarding bad behavior.

Letting Crew Scheduling push you to accept something of questionable legality, for example, is akin to feeding the trolls. If they know you'll do it, they'll keep trying to get you to do it. You have to throw it back in their face and tell them to pound sand, if need be.
 
Firebird2XC said:
What I'm saying is that there are times when pilots allow themselves to be put in compromising positions because they lack the wherewithal to walk away when they know they should.
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But this rules doesn't help the problem of pilots having type A personalities.
 
Firebird2XC said:
Explain? Are you referring to the 'mission mentality'?
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Yea, look at how many good planes pilots have put into the ground because they didn't walk away from the airplane. Then look how many times is was because "mission mentality" vs not having the experience to walk away.
 
USMCmech said:
I don't think anyone would disagree with that. Clearly your average military pilot is a better flyer at 500 hours than I am with with 3000. And even though I just passed my ATP checkride in a light twin, I don't know squat about flying a jet.

But, how exactly do you weight the different types of experience? Is an hour of crop dusting more or less valuable than an hour of instruction? How about the military guys who flew F-15s in combat vs the C-5 crews who are basically flying a 747? When Astronaut Hoot Gibson retired from the Navy and NASA with three space shuttle flights and who knows how many carrier landings, was he qualified to fly 737s for Southwest?

The more skilled and more broad experienced a pilot is, the better. But how exactly do you force the airlines to hire such pilots instead of the cheaper and very inexperienced Gulfstream grads?
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No. Not necessarily better, just different. Ask a 500hr military guy to hand fly a complicated circling approach at night, or to fly Special VFR and you'll see the limitations that exist. Ask the same guy to maneuver in behind an adversary and kill him and he performs excellently. You can be a stone cold aerial killer in an F-16 and be sketchy as hell at other types of flying. I'm a single pilot IFR guy who is used to doing things "my way" in the airplane, put me in a crew environment and I'm going to take time to adjust.

Put anyone in a new airplane and you'll see it. I jumped into the PC-12 for the first time this last weekend, I've got a little shy of 5000hrs now, and just came from Simcom. While the PC-12 is super easy to fly from a handling and stability standpoint (I think it's pretty much impossible to screw up a landing), learning to program two touch screen Garmins, an MFD, a handheld and the first "good" autopilot I've ever used ("you mean to say that it'll hold an airspeed for me and capture an altitude?!") was a little much. I spent more time saying "F-it" and punching off all the automation to handfly just to have my instructor say, "no, I want you to get used to using it, go ahead and program it up, take your time." Learning to integrate all the information being jammed into my head was a bit much - more than I was accustomed to which is somewhat embarrassing to me that after ten years of flying airplanes around, an airplane that is as easy to fly as a giant 182 somehow managed to provide me with information overload. The next day I jumped in the Navajo and flew a trip and had no problem.
 
Gonzo said:
Yea, look at how many good planes pilots have put into the ground because they didn't walk away from the airplane. Then look how many times is was because "mission mentality" vs not having the experience to walk away.
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Being 'Type A' or task oriented does not necessarily predispose a pilot to causing an accident. The anti-authority, macho, "it can't happen to me, let's just get it done..." mentality does. It's the most insidious form of pilot pushing- there are incentives in place to get it done, so a pilot pushes themselves into an impossible scenario.

Ultimately, self-evaluation is just as much as important as self-awareness. This may actually be harder, as knowing one's true motivations isn't always as easy as identifying outward ones. That's why we all have to encourage each other.
If you don't feel good about something, speak up. If your concerns aren't addressed, walk away.

Even in the military, when I was working in medevac choppers, we knew this. We knew somebody might die if we didn't go, but we also realized that if we went and balled up the chopper, we might kill the patient, plus the four of us, thereby doing nobody any good. In fact, we actually did harm beyond those aboard- removing an asset like that from operation might mean other people died.

In the civilian world, once again barring medevac, nobody dies if you don't go! So slow down, and breathe. Ask yourself what you might be risking if you make the wrong call because you willingly let yourself be forced... Nobody dies if you don't go.
 
zmiller4 said:
I agree that 1500 hours is an arbitrary number, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere. You obviously can't legislate actual "experience", but you can certainly increase the likelihood that an airline pilot will be more capable by implementing a minimum hour requirement. At the very least, accumulating that time ensures that you take the career path seriously and have put some effort into getting to an airline. There are no such guarantees with a 250hr 90-day wonder, which is what some airlines were getting in the hiring boom.
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It wasn't totally arbitrary, at least from the 3407 Project angle. We pondered various numbers- I even played devil's advocate and considered 800 or 1000. Ultimately the number was chosen because it's the same number for the ATP- which is what you needed to be a Captain.

Historically, a lot of planes were really one pilot with an apprentice-assistant pilot. They later expanded to three, or two and an engineer, then technology cut it back to two again. But then it was clear- there were supposed to be two fully capable pilots up there. If they're supposed to be more or less interchangeable, why not require the same minimum standards?
 
USMCmech said:
I don't think anyone would disagree with that. Clearly your average military pilot is a better flyer at 500 hours than I am with with 3000. And even though I just passed my ATP checkride in a light twin, I don't know squat about flying a jet.
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I'm not sure you can put it on the military to be that much better at training pilots. I rode shotgun on a lot of unit level training ops, and the varied levels of skill of the new Blackhawk pilots was as wide as you can imagine. One pilot, for example, fresh out of flight school, demonstrated themselves to be a hazard and generally ignorant at pretty much any level of flight. They lacked the ability to keep the aircraft straight and level in cruise, despite many hours at Mother Rucker practicing before they go there. I'm told in the Blackhawk, with its Flight Path Stabilization and Stability Augmentation Systems, it takes real talent to do that.

In another instance, a pilot fresh to the unit rolled up with his shiny new commerical pilot and CFI tickets. He joined up and proceeded to be a cartwheeling cluster of training deficiencies. In nearly a decade of riding in the back and running the checklists during Emergency Procedures training, I never heard memory items like this pilot had. Engine failures in flight now required jettisoning the cockpit doors, simply failures required immediate landings, etc.

There are as many holes in the military training community as there are in the civilian one- I suppose maybe the trends seem less glaring depending on your branch of service and the population size.

I do know one thing, though. The more they flew the better they got. Except for that first pilot- we sent them home for bizarre neurological issues after a few months in in Iraq. They later got on with a civilian helo medevac outfit- we had good laugh at the bullets on their resume. I stumbled across this aviator not too long ago on Facebook. They're at Air Wisconsin now.

So much for military experience.
 
KSCessnaDriver said:
Then get rid of pay scales for FO's and Captains. Get rid of FO and Captain in general. Pilot flying is PIC, Pilot monitoring is SIC.
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Eh, no. Somebody has to bear the onus of making the final call, of signing the papers. That goes to the old man- the seasoned, senior, allegedly superior flyer. There has to be some incentive for likely being the goat in the end.
 
Firebird2XC said:
Being 'Type A' or task oriented does not necessarily predispose a pilot to causing an accident. The anti-authority, macho, "it can't happen to me, let's just get it done..." mentality does. It's the most insidious form of pilot pushing- there are incentives in place to get it done, so a pilot pushes themselves into an impossible scenario.
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What specific hull losses in recent memory were a direct result of an anti-authority attitude?

I'm not familiar with any that were the result of intentionally flying an un-airworthy aircraft, or intentionally flying into an impossible scenario.

At the risk of sounding unpopular, perhaps there are some folks flying that shouldn't be - period. It just doesn't benefit anyone in the short term for them to walk away and not come back. I'm among the worst of the worst out there, so I'm qualified to suggest so :)
 
So I've been following this thread pretty thoroughly, and both "sides" have valid arguments. I'm just a lowly 200 hour "almost" commercial pilot (checkride in a week), but what I keep coming back to is this question...

If we're now limiting guys to 1500 and 23 y/o, where does that leave them to get said time? It seems to me that the cycle is just going to continue, only earlier on in the process, ie as CFI's. Look at ATP, you take a guy through an accelerated 90 day program, 0 to hero, then turn around and think that they're qualified to teach anyone anything about an airplane? This continues with that student and so on and so forth. Don't get me wrong, my CFI at ATP has been extremely knowledgeable, it just seems counter-intuitive (even though I know that's how it's "always been done"). That being said, the question I have is if instructing is the only option for a "young buck" in the industry, at what point does the supply of people willing to go that route run dry? The military isn't putting out the number of pilots they used to. The regionals can't afford to pay guys what they deserve and will now start demanding as the shortage apocalypse looms, and even the little operators (Survey / tow / jump / etc) that are the only alternative to instructing start raising mins as well, where does that leave someone in my position?

Not trying to start anything here, but honestly trying to get a sense from the collective on what a fresh CMEL can do. I'm all for safety reform, but what I'm not all for is pulling up the ladder.

cheers
 
drunkenbeagle said:
What specific hull losses in recent memory were a direct result of an anti-authority attitude?
I'm not familiar with any that were the result of intentionally flying an un-airworthy aircraft, or intentionally flying into an impossible scenario.
At the risk of sounding unpopular, perhaps there are some folks flying that shouldn't be - period. It just doesn't benefit anyone in the short term for them to walk away and not come back. I'm among the worst of the worst out there, so I'm qualified to suggest so :)
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I actually agree with the sentiment. I've flown with some individuals who were questionable aviators at best. But were they having an off day, or was this a habit? Sadly, there are cases where people universally agree, and something does get said- but nobody does anything.

.. and while I can't speak of any hull losses in recent memory due to anti-authority, I'm sure there has been one somewhere. Here might be one- remember the jet crash that killed the singer, Aaliyah? IIRC, the jet was severely overloaded ("Screw it, I'll load up and won't do a weight and balance- to keep the clients happy"). Not to mention one of the pilots had cocaine in his bloodstream at the time.

Or you could just go with 3407. The FAA tells us, don't fly when you're sick or tired- IM SAFE, right? It also tells us that if we're not as healthy as our medical certificate says we are, then we don't get to exercise our certificate privileges, right?
 
ozziecat35 said:
Not trying to start anything here, but honestly trying to get a sense from the collective on what a fresh CMEL can do. I'm all for safety reform, but what I'm not all for is pulling up the ladder.
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What many forget is that the ladder was pretty far up before 2007 when the regionals started scraping the bottom of the barrel.

In the mid 90s you had to have and ATP, 2500 hours, and 500 TPIC, before you could even interview at ASA. Then if you did get a job, you had to pay THEM for your initial training.

How did people get twice the flight time that the new requiremnt demands? They got their CFI, flew freight, charter, meat missles, ect. These same avenues are still open today.
 
Seggy said:
My point is to say that it was his idea to go to Congress instead of the FAA and think of that as a break through idea that has never been done is disingenuous at best. Also, look at the timing issues AND the fact that the families were already on their way to push for change before the project really took form. Finally, Congress was already moving towards pushing the FAA to do something which is evident from the Boccieri letter.
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Actually, in additional honesty, the only letter I personally wrote to a government official was the one I wrote to Boccieri, the one written at your request. I recall you referring me to a few reporters, too.

Everything else I did comprised of speaking out in the press and encouraging others to speak up.
It's kind of interesting to me that you're so eager to downplay my contributions here, after you were so eager to get me involved at the time.

It's nice to be remembered.

I suppose I, as a 'non-official' party, I was able to say things you were not. I guess 'non-official' stuff doesn't go in 'Flying The Line, Vol. 3'.
But hey, score one for ALPA National!

EDIT: And yes, Seggy, I have proof of this.. at the very least. Cheers.
 
ozziecat35 said:
Not trying to start anything here, but honestly trying to get a sense from the collective on what a fresh CMEL can do. I'm all for safety reform, but what I'm not all for is pulling up the ladder.
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I like that expression- "pulling up the ladder".

It's not like we're saying people will never be given a chance. We're just asking them to wait a tiny bit longer. Considering a lot of the hiring trends since 2009, it's not like we barred thousands from employment.

What's *really* funny to me is the people howling at people (such a myself) who were hired with less than ATP mins, years ago, under old regulations, saw the regulations change, let years pass, and STILL aren't qualified, but now think that the regulations shouldn't apply to them. Because hey, people who had the same qualifications got in.. before the regs changed. Say what? What should we do? Just kick everybody to the street and have a drawing? The people already hired- everywhere, at any time, before or after the regulations, must now meet the new regs or face unemployment. The bar went up on everybody- regardless of where they are now, or where they were then.

Things change. Adapting to a changing environment is part of being a pilot. Suck it up.
 
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